Instagram soft launches its new BOLT messaging app

We recently told you about Instagram accidently alerting a few of their Instagram users about their “one tap photo messaging” BOLT app but we were not sure what the app was for. Instagram has just started a soft launch of their BOLT app and initially it will be available in 3 counties including New Zealand, Singapore, and South Africa.

BOLT is similar to Snapchat where users will be able to send both pictures and videos to their friends which will get disappeared after the receiver views them but the way users can send pictures and videos is based on how Taptalk works. To send a picture users would have to tap on the icon of their friends while sending videos users will have to long press on the icon of their friends. The number of icon of friends on the screen is up to 4 while 20 friends can be added to your account which can be accessed by simply swiping the screen. Shaking the phone will cancel anything that is accidently sent by the user.

The new Instagram BOLT app is currently available on Android and IOS. Instagram also told The Verge that the reason why they are keeping the launch of the app limited only to a few number of countries is to see how well the app scales up and if the results were good they are going to globally launch their BOLT app.

Andrew Benton who is the developer of the first BOLT app also requested Facebook to change the name of their app but looks like Facebook doesn’t care about that because the company has gone with the name and hasn’t changed it yet though Andrew Benton did say that he will take a legal action against Facebook incase the company didn’t reconsider the name of the app.